The Role of Domain Expenence in Software Design
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering - Special issue on artificial intelligence and software engineering
Programmers at work
A field study of the software design process for large systems
Communications of the ACM
Communication breakdowns and boundary spanning activities on large programming projects
Empirical studies of programmers: second workshop
Breakdowns and processes during the early activities of software design by professionals
Empirical studies of programmers: second workshop
External cognition: how do graphical representations work?
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
A glimpse of expert programmers' mental imagery
ESP '97 Papers presented at the seventh workshop on Empirical studies of programmers
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
Contextual design: defining customer-centered systems
Side-by-side collaboration: a case study
International Journal of Human-Computer Studies
Extreme programming explained: embrace change
Extreme programming explained: embrace change
How does radical collocation help a team succeed?
CSCW '00 Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work
Information and information seeking of novice versus expert lawyers: how experts add value
The New Review of Information Behaviour Research
Supporting multidisciplinary collaboration: requirements from novel HCI education
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
Mental imagery and software visualization in high-performance software development teams
Journal of Visual Languages and Computing
Software design sketching with calico
Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM international conference on Automated software engineering
Storytelling in interaction: agility in practice
XP'06 Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Extreme Programming and Agile Processes in Software Engineering
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Fundamental to the effective operation of a design team is the communication and coordination of design models: that the members of the team are all contributing to the same solution. Other work has shown that breakdowns in the accurate sharing of goals are a significant contributor to bugs, delays and design flaws. This paper discusses one mechanism by which teams unify their vision of a solution. It describes how the mental imagery used by a key team member in constructing an abstract solution to a design problem can be externalized and adopted by the rest of the team as a focal image. Examples drawn from in situ observations of actual design practice of a number of computer system design teams are offered. The examples illustrate how the images were introduced, how they were used to coordinate subsequent design discussions, hence how they evolved, and how shorthand references to them were incorporated into the team's 'jargon'.